A Venezuelan mother desperately searching for her son after U.S. immigration officials detained him says she spotted him shackled on TV among hundreds of migrants the Trump administration has accused of being violent gang members and sent to a Salvadoran prison.
“It’s him. It’s him,” an emotional Mirelis Casique told the BBC of having seen her 24-year-old son, Francisco Javier Garcia Casique, in photos of restrained men in all-white clothing and newly shaved heads. “I recognize his features.”
Casique said her son entered the U.S. in late 2023 to seek asylum. He presented himself to authorities at the border and was released, but was then briefly detained in Texas last year following a routine appearance with immigration officers after they saw his tattoos, she told The New York Times.
Those tattoos included the word “peace” in Spanish, some family names, and a crown. They prompted U.S. authorities to label Garcia Casique a suspected gang member and take him into custody for two months before releasing him with an electronic monitor.
On Feb. 6, law enforcement authorities came to Garcia Casique’s door and took him back into custody, his mother said.
“He doesn’t belong to any criminal gang, either in the U.S. or in Venezuela… he’s not a criminal,” she told The BBC. “What he’s been is a barber.”
A man identifying himself as Garcia Casique’s brother also shared photos of him cutting hair on social media while insisting that his brother is innocent and wrongfully incarcerated.
“What injustice is this? For having tattoos? Why didn’t they investigate him? Why didn’t they send him to his country of origin?” his brother wrote with the photos. “Respect the human rights of innocent people.”
The U.S. and Salvadoran governments have not offered any evidence showing that the deported migrants are connected to the Tren de Aragua gang, which has been designated as a terrorist group by President Donald Trump.
In a court filing, officials acknowledged that many of the people sent to El Salvador do not have criminal records, though they claimed this “does not indicate they pose a limited threat.”
“The lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose,” the administration said in a sworn declaration.
Despite the apparent lack of due process and proof that the migrants are gang members, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said they will be imprisoned for at least a year and forced to perform labor under a program called “Zero Idleness.” This program is designed to make the country’s prison system, which costs $200 million a year to run, self-sustaining, Bukele said.
“As always, we continue advancing in the fight against organized crime. But this time, we are also helping our allies, making our prison system self-sustainable, and obtaining vital intelligence to make our country an even safer place,” he said in a statement posted on social media.
Other family members of the imprisoned migrants have made similar pleas for help, insisting that their loved ones have been mistakenly identified as gang members and sent to the maximum-security Salvadoran prison.
“He has lots of tattoos, but that’s not a reason to discriminate against him,” Johanny Sánchez told The Washington Post of her Venezuelan husband, Franco Caraballo, whom she said was among those deported from Texas to El Salvador.
Another Venezuelan mother told the Post that her son, Ali David Navas Vizcaya, vanished after being told last week that he was going to be deported to Venezuela or Mexico. He was detained in early 2024 after appearing for an appointment with immigration officers at the U.S.-Mexico border, she said.
“He told me, ‘Finally, we’re going to be together, and this nightmare is going to be over,’” his mother, Xiomara Vizcaya, who lives in the northern Venezuelan city of Barquisimeto, said of her son’s last phone call to her on Friday.
A relative of migrant Mervin Yamarte, 29, also told NBC News that Yamarte’s family “fainted. They started screaming,” when they saw him in a social media video with a shaved head and ripped shirt among the people deported to El Salvador.
His brother, like many others, said Yamarte was misidentified as a gang member solely because of his tattoos.
The sister of migrant Fritzgeralth De Jesus said the same about her brother.
“From the beginning, they asked constantly about his tattoos. They would ask him if he was a member of the criminal gang, Tren de Aragua, and he always said no,” she also told NBC News.
On Wednesday, an attorney for detained Venezuelan soccer player Jerce Reyes Barrios accused U.S. authorities of deporting him to El Salvador because of his tattoos and a photo of him making hand gestures, which the lawyer said mean “rock and roll” or “I love you.”
His tattoos include a crown on top of a soccer ball with a rosary and the word “Dios,” which means “God” in Spanish, the attorney said in a court filing.